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WAILEA, Hawaii – The growing number of satellites in orbit is leading to calls to develop formal ‘right of way’ rules, although there is no consensus on what these rules should be and how they should be. established.
Several close approaches to satellites in recent years, sometimes exacerbated by disagreements or communication disruptions between satellite operators, today demonstrate the lack of benchmarks and the need to develop them as mega-constellations proliferate.
“For the right of way, the regulatory framework is please don’t plant your satellite, and really please don’t plant it on someone else,” said Ruth Stilwell, executive director of ‘Aerospace Policy Solutions, during a panel at Advanced Maui Optical. and Space Surveillance Technologies, or AMOS, conference here on September 16.
It is unlikely, she said, that there would be an “uber authority” managing space traffic on a global scale and coordinating the maneuvers of the satellites. The alternative is a self-organized network of satellite operators who agree on standards to determine which satellite has the right of way.
Progress has already been made on this front with agreements between satellite operators. In March, NASA and SpaceX signed an agreement whereby SpaceX agreed to move its satellites if they approached a NASA spacecraft.
“Bilateral agreements are necessary and problematic,” Stilwell said. The details of these agreements, while effective between operators, “do not create a standard across the community, so we need more visibility on the willingness and desire to achieve that standard so that we can self-identify. -to organise”.
She compared it to the self-organization of pedestrian traffic, where people traditionally give way to the right when someone approaches. However, this may not work in an international setting, like an airport, where others are used to giving way to the left. “We have right of way concepts, security principles, but they depend on having enough information about each other,” she said. “This includes a reasonable expectation of what other actors will do as well as an awareness of their health, abilities and abilities.”
Satellite operators are still considering what kind of priority rules to put in place to determine who would maneuver in the event that two satellites could both do so. David Goldstein, senior guidance, navigation and control engineer at SpaceX, has suggested that one such rule is that satellites elevating their orbits be required to maneuver around satellites in the operational orbits they pass through.
Maneuvers come at a cost to satellite operators, as they spend propellants that affect their lifespan and possibly require them to temporarily discontinue service. This can cause satellite operators to take no action, forcing the other operator to move their satellite.
“It can make others behave badly because they can avoid some costs. This is another area where building standards of behavior is so important, ”said Zack Donohew, resident researcher at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder. He called for finding ways of “social disapproval” for these bad actors.
“This is an opportunity for the United States and its allies to take the lead,” he said, although mechanisms like the Space Sustainability Rating are being developed by an international consortium.
Even partial solutions could be helpful. In a separate presentation to AMOS on September 15, Mariel Borowitz of the Georgia Institute of Technology discussed the work being done to examine the effectiveness of various right-of-way approaches for space traffic management, modeling them based on of the current orbital population. The study examined both the effectiveness of these potential rules as well as their overall effectiveness.
Research has shown that a “US-only” system could still have a significant impact on reducing the risk of satellite collisions, bypassing the complications of establishing an international space traffic management regime. . “We are finding some initial support for this idea of the United States as a prime mover,” she said. “From an efficiency point of view, it seems to be able to make a difference.”
On the AMOS panel, Stilwell compared Kessler’s syndrome, an exponential growth of orbital debris caused by a chain reaction of collisions, to the threshold of a two-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures above which there could be catastrophic impacts on the planet’s climate.
“We can debate the horror of the result, but the point is that a lot of bad things can happen along the way,” she said. “It doesn’t matter when or if there is Kessler syndrome. Today we have a problem that results from congestion and the generation of debris in space that we need to solve. “
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